Amnesia: Rebirth

Just kind of boring. The Dark Descent was fantastic and SOMA was an amazing philosophical journey but this game just kind of meanders around the desert. I'll be honest I gave up after about 4 hours of play. I'm just bored and Tasi is about interesting as a damp rag.

(Very) Minor spoilers ahead. Rebirth is a let down, a big one. I can't decide if it's storywise worse than a Machine For Pigs or not (though MFP wasn't a real Frictional Game). Penumbra, Dark Decent and Soma were MASTERPIECES! - Rebirth is nowhere near of them. Even if Rebirth has way more gameplay than in SOMA, it is interrupted with too many cutscenes, usually literally 5 steps apart from each other, too clunky movement and 3 lackluster endings. After the VERY slow intro building up athmosphere nicely, there are some monsters who chase you BUT this is FAR LESS scary or demanding than it sounds or the game wants to make you believe. Matches and lamp-oil are just enough to find, if you looked, to make generous use of both (later you lose the lamp anyway). Dark Decent was WAY MORE engaging and captivating in this regard. The puzzles aren't very demanding either (good thing here). And about all puzzles are.either with the solution very close by or it leads you to a completely new level to explore first. Also the game tells too much and let's you experience too less. The game is OK until you give birth, then it goes downhill. Until then it also has revealed it's only 2 underdelivering 'plot twists' (minor spoiler: eATiV Si TaHw dna luOHg EHt si OHW). I even got the secret ending, assuming it was the normal one and thought *underwhelmed sarcastic tone*: "yeah great, so that was that". After having been totally flashed by Penumbra and Dark Decent, I bough MFP at full price and deeply regretted it, so I did not buy SOMA at release and practically got it for free later and was totally flashed by it, Then I bought Rebirth at full price and really regretting it (so I will pretend I did pay the full price for SOMA instead). But with the next game from Frictional I will def. take a very close look before I buy it! Wait for a deep sale to get this, if you are still interested! Rebirth is not actually bad, it`s just so ... underdelivering.

The first Amnesia is a horror classic and the second was deeply atmospheric, though very short and lacking in actual gameplay. Rebirth marks a welcome return to having some gameplay mechanics beyond just being a walking simulator, while at the same time being the first in the series that is immersive and unrelenting enough to truly feel terrifying. The story, personalities and environments are all better developed than previous titles, and the environment of Algerian caves and ruins (as well as the mysterious other world) has more character and variety than the castle and factory of the previous titles, which were filled with reused assets that gave them a low-budget feel despite the games' quality. The ability to see your own body in this game adds to the immersion a lot, as well as being vital to the plot, and the monsters, while not quite as gruesome as the abominations from Dark Descent, are much smarter and scarier. I remember crouching on the other side of a wall from one of them, hearing it sniffing at the air as though seeking me out. When it moved a little further along I tried to sneak down the corridor it had just come from, only for my foot to accidentally knock against a stone lid on the floor, making a slight clunk. Immediately the sniffing stopped. I broke into a full-on, desperate run, the monster snarling and howling behind me in hot pursuit, and I just barely made it out alive. This wasn't a scripted event, this was just normal game play, and it felt like a scene straight out of an actual horror movie. This level of vulnerability, combined with the grueling, merciless journey that continually throws you from a bad situation into an even worse one, really made me feel the protagonist's trauma. Things felt a little contrived and less scary near the end, and the bleak endings, while not unusual for the series, felt unfairly tragic for a woman that really hadn't done anything to earn all this misery. But overall, an intense, worthwhile experience.

This is a very frustrating game. On the one hand, it represents a sincere attempt at following up the worldbuilding and themes of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Maybe it doesn't totally succeed, but I think it's worthy of respect in this regard. The art direction is consistently very strong, too. On the other, it fundamentally fails to advance on The Dark Descent as a video game. It has all the Frictional tropes- alternating exploration and pursuit sequences, simple physics puzzles, enemies who make the protagonist go crazy if you look at them. Frictional has been iterating on what they did in the Penumbra games for over a decade, and the well is running dry. They've scaled up the narrative stuff (this game has more notes and cutscenes than any prior Frictional game), but they've scaled back the puzzles (both the conventional adventure game puzzles and the physics puzzles), and failed to meaningfully innovate in the scares their games deliver. They've hewed to the survival horror genre, even while it seems like their real desire is to make elaborate walking sims. It's frustrating! I like Frictional's games, basically, even if I sometimes wish they were better, and I would like them to succeed and advance; but they seem determined to wall themselves into doing progressively staler horror games forever. Also the acting is very uneven, and they didn't even get the actors to pronounce the protagonist's name consistently. Embarrassing.

I think they tried to focus equally in the narrative and horror, as a result they made an OKish game